We’ve just updated our privacy policy!

Posted on Sep 1, 2016
by Marsh Davies

Hello, everyone!

It’s exactly as the title says. Our privacy policy was looking a little dog-eared and a refresh was due! So, in order to bring things up to date, we’ve now adopted the privacy policy of our owner, Microsoft.

It’s pretty normal for a company of Microsoft’s size to have a single privacy policy for all of its different bits as it takes a lot of time and effort to maintain multiple policies and translate them into different languages for our users all around the world. By joining the Microsoft Privacy Statement , we can spend less time maintaining all these separate policies and more time making our games even more awesome. This is the same policy used by Skype, Outlook and our fellow devs over at 343 Industries - so you’ll see stuff in there that doesn’t directly apply to Minecraft.

One thing we are doing is to clarify for our PC / Mac players that - in addition to cookies - we may use device and account identifiers and similar technologies to tell how large our active userbase is and to analyze how our games are performing. Our old privacy policy already allowed us to do that with cookies but we wanted to make sure our policy keeps up with the times. In any case, we give you a breakdown of exactly what we collect in the game’s options menu, and you can always toggle the whole thing off if you want to opt out. But we hope you don’t - it’s super useful to have this data as we continue to improve the game, figuring out what hardware needs support and which problems need our attention.